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aodin

For an article with quite a few numbers, it seems to be missing some basic ones:

* Taiwan, area 36,197 km^2, population density 651 / km^2 [1]

* California, area 403,932 km^2, population density 97 / km^2 [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Taiwan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

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That's a nonsequitur. The California coast is pretty dense, the rest of the state has large amounts of empty space and national parks. Nobody would build a high-speed rail through Yosemite or Death Valley.

The same is also true of Taiwan to a smaller degree. They have a populated coast and then a sparse interior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Taiwan#/media/...

Central Taiwan is full of high mountains, tallest one is nearly 13,000ft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu_Shan

> Nobody would build a high-speed rail through Yosemite or Death Valley

Yet it detoured to stop in farmland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Taiwan#/media/...

vs.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:California_populatio...

The reddest areas on the California map would be orange on the Taiwan map.

A San Jose to Bakersfield route (comparable in length to the Taiwan route) has a huge low-population density area around the middle, so basically there's no prospect of using the rail for shorter trips. And the number of daily trips between San Jose and Bakersfield is likely to be limited.

It's still grasping at straws. The idea is to connect SF and LA, which are much larger than Taipei and Kaohsiung. In-between stops are a bonus.

The initial stage is to connect Merced and Bakersfield, which has no clear payoff. All other stages of the project are indefinitely postponed.

The post author compared San Jose to Bakersfield, as it's the same length as the Taiwan connection.

It's not a non-sequitur, it matters a lot in the end it implies on average considerably longer distances through less density.It matters in the calculation.

The total area of the state isn't too relevant, since California isn't exactly proposing to build HSR to Eureka or Redding.

It's true that California's project is larger-scale, but by 2x: Taiwan has a single 200-mile HSR line, and California is trying to build a single 400-mile line.

Taiwan has 1/5th the GDP of California. So, it’s more like California had even lower goals than Taiwan.

Maybe part of the reason for the higher GDP is the lack of wasteful infrastructure spending with low returns?

How many potential riders live along each respective corridor? How many people want to travel between San Jose and Bakersfield vs Taipei and Kaohsiung?

I’d guesstimate an order of magnitude lower as proposed; the California plan doesn’t make much sense to me without extending the line 100 miles further from Bakersfield to LA.

Well, the original proposal that voters passed was SF–LA, which has very large populations at both ends, and makes a bit more sense (this is also what I was counting as 400 miles). The (maybe temporary, maybe not) scale-back seems to be due to rapidly ballooning estimates of construction cost. I agree that a Merced–Bakersfield line is less compelling, to put it mildly.

Which points to what I think is the main issue, both here and with most other US transit projects: US rail construction costs are very high, even compared to other high-wage countries. If we could get subway and rail projects done at the per-mile costs that Japan, Denmark, France, or Germany manage, I think we'd both have more things already successfully built, and more public appetite to fund more.

There's some digging on that question on this blog: https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/

Also keep in mind the topography. There is about 50-ish miles of mountains standing between Los Angeles and the Central Valley (15 fewer if you deter via Palmsdale), and you have a similar conundrum going from the Central Valley to the Bay Area. By contrast in Taiwan, you can travel mostly via coastal flats.

Most of Taiwan is fairly mountainous and empty. Most of the population is in a few cities (Kaohsiung Taichung Tainan Taipei Taoyuan). It's enough to connect them with high-speed trains, and that's what happened.

How does BART compare?

It doesn't exist in 99% of California by area

It doesn’t. Taipei’s MRT is also lightyears ahead of BART.

Kaohsiung's is even better.

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